Earning electric karma

The life of my average gadget is not a particularly dignified one.  Many of my electronic purchases lie neglected at the bottom of random home and office drawers, dinged through careless handling, with missing accessories and batteries slowly leaking in their springs.

This was the fate of a Garmin hand-held GPS unit that I bought three or four years ago.  When I first took it out of the UPS box and popped in a fresh set of batteries, it blinked awake and displayed a world map with the cursor centered on Japan. “How cute”, I remember thinking, “it thinks it’s still home.”  A few seconds later, as the Garmin started to receive satellite signals, it realized that it was somewhere else.  It took a minute or two for the precise truth to sink in:  It was far from its carefree birth and testing lab; it was on the other side of the world in Cambridge, Massachusetts.  It might have been quietly sad.

Over the next few years, the Garmin has been driven across the United States, left forgotten under stacks of paper, wearily fingered by airport security guards, dropped into puddles in Stockholm and down stairs in Hong Kong.  Throughout it all, the GPS carried out its duties with stoic honor and never mentioned home again.

Yesterday, I finally turned it on outside my hotel in Tokyo.  The Garmin took some time to catch up with the months and miles since it was last awake, but it soon displayed the exact same map that had never appeared since the first few seconds of its professional life.  There was no happy animation or other outward indication, but I’d like to think that somewhere inside, a fuzzy-logic chip grew warm for a while.